Opinion: Lego and what has happened to creativity?

One thing I loved doing as a child was building and creating things. With models, there were two types of projects:

Models with components and instructions (like Airfix)
Basic building materials (like Lego)

With Airfix models, the challenge was to follow the instructions to build the project, then great care required to paint and finalize the model. But there really wasn’t much creativity involved.

With basic building materials like Lego, creativity was needed to produce something that looked like (or let’s admit it often just “resembled”) whatever you were trying to build.

Prepackaged Lego models

I remember when Lego started producing components that enhanced what you were building, but you could never really build with the Lego bricks. You could build a type of wheel, but you couldn’t really build a tyre (tire).

Moving forward to today, Lego has moved almost entirely across to producing models with components and instructions. No argument that they’re great, and people enjoy building them, but that’s really no different to what we used to do with Airfix models i.e., get the pieces and follow the instructions. And you don’t even need to paint things any more.

Loss of creativity?

What I don’t see much any more, is children starting with a collection of blocks and letting their imagination run wild. I’m sure some do, but it’s not what I mostly see.

It worries me that we’ve lost a lot of the creativity.

Mind you, most of the expensive Lego kits are really targeted at adults anyway.

I did have a chuckle at how this one was labelled. You can have a Creator label but that doesn’t make it creative.

In the past, the amazing thing with Lego constructions wasn’t how good it looked, it was hard to believe it could have been built with Lego in the first place.

Miss my grandfather

I didn’t get to spend enough time with my grandfather. He lived 600km away so I only saw him a few times a year. Fortunately, at those times, we’d often go for a week or two, so I really did get to spend time with him.

What I loved was his creativity. In his workshop, he could make anything out of almost anything else. I only wish I could have spent more time there with him.

Funny story though, was that in his workshop, he had books and magazines like “Boys Own”, often from the 1940’s. It was a real eye-opener to see what boys were doing then. (And yes, it was pretty male-dominated at the time).

I remember reading one magazine from the time of the 2nd world war. Not only did it show you how to build a submarine, it showed you how to build depth-charges that worked.

That’s in the category of “things you’re unlikely to see in a magazine for children today”.

Ram Chandra

But it was a different world then. The best example of that was Ram Chandra (aka The Taipan Man) .

He used to come to the local shopping centre near my grandfather’s place, set up an above ground pool, and bring a bunch of taipans and other really nasty snakes, to do demonstrations.